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Creative writing at UBC: an appreciation

CBC Arts looks back at the University of British Columbia’s creative writing program on the occasion of its 40th anniversary. There is, of course, a strong emphasis on the commercial glory days of the late 1990s and early 2000s, when Eden Robinson, Annabel Lyon, Steven Galloway, and Nancy Lee, among countless other UBC MFA grads, went on to find fame and fortune (on the CanLit scale, at least). “[N]early half the graduating class of 2001 finished school with a book contract,” notes the writer of the CBC Arts piece, writer Greg Buium. The more recent sharp downturn in the market for first-time fiction gets much less play in the story, though agent Denise Bukowski is quoted as saying, “It’s very hard to convince the media that fiction isn’t what they think it is. Publishers are running scared right now because fiction isn’t selling.”

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Click here for the CBC Arts story